OpenAI has paused new sign-ups for the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan. The news came from Thibault Sottiaux, who leads Codex and core ChatGPT products, in a post on U.S. time September 10. Existing Pro subscribers are unaffected, and the Go, Plus, Business, and Enterprise tiers, along with the API, remain open.
The trigger was GPT-6 Astra. The model launched on September 3 and is still being rolled out across paid tiers. The day before the pause, Sottiaux had already posted that demand for Astra was "unlike anything" he had seen before, and warned that new Pro sign-ups might have to stop for a while. A day later, that warning became reality.
Only the heaviest-load tier
Pro's selling point is the highest usage cap, which is exactly where the heaviest users concentrate. Sottiaux explained that this tier puts the most strain on the system, which is why it's the only one affected:
"We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible."
He added that the team is working to expand compute capacity as quickly as possible. The announcement gave no timeline for when new Pro sign-ups would reopen.
A report from South Korea's SBS noted that Pro currently comes in two price points, $100 and $200. OpenAI's pause names only the $200 tier; the announcement said nothing about the status of the $100 tier.
For individual users, the impact falls on people who wanted to newly sign up for Pro. Existing subscribers keep using it as normal. Plus subscribers are also within Astra's rollout, just at a lower usage cap than Pro. Developers who need high volume and can't wait can still pay by usage through the API. Team and enterprise customers are not affected by this pause at all.
Plus was closed once before, in 2023
The last time OpenAI closed new sign-ups for a paid tier over compute shortages was after its November 2023 developer conference. That time it was the $20 Plus plan, announced personally by Sam Altman, and it reopened about a month later.
The same pressure showed up elsewhere this past April. GitHub stopped accepting new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student on April 20, citing long-running parallel agentic tasks that consumed far more compute than those plans were designed to handle. GitHub also pulled Opus 4.7 from the Pro tier, keeping it only on Pro+, and added per-session limits plus a rolling 7-day token cap.
Around the same time, Claude Code was struck through on Anthropic's pricing page under the $20 Pro plan. Growth lead Amol Avasare explained it was a small test aimed at roughly 2% of new users, and it was reversed in under a day. At the time, he said usage had varied too widely, and the existing plan wasn't designed for that kind of use.
The three tightening moves landed in different places. GitHub and Anthropic acted on their cheapest tiers, capping usage or pulling features. OpenAI this time closed the entry point on its most expensive tier and left the cheaper ones untouched. One possible explanation is that demand in a new model's early days concentrates among top-end heavy users, and flat monthly pricing breaks down fastest for that group. OpenAI hasn't published actual Pro usage figures, so that explanation can't be verified for now.
The 2023 pause lasted about a month. This time, Astra hasn't finished rolling out to every tier yet, and when new Pro sign-ups return depends on how fast OpenAI can bring new compute online.
Sources: TechCrunch, Thibault Sottiaux's announcement on X, CocoLoop, South Korea's SBS; the scope of the pause follows the tiers listed in OpenAI's own announcement, and the GitHub and Anthropic details follow each company's official statements.